O! Herbert!

Lady Chatterly Revisited

Mellors finished his sandwich and coffee … and lit a cigarette he had rolled. It was cool there in the woods …on the ground … hidden from the sun. He felt a vague drowsiness come over him … so he stretched out on the ground … while continuing to smoke. The birds chirped loudly in the trees … and the sound of the gurgling water … in the stream behind him … served as a lullaby … softly caressing him for an afternoon nap. There was a loud splashing sound in the river … and he turned to lay on his stomach … to see it.

In the water … a mother iguana was swimming with a splashing motion downstream … followed by its baby … a few feet behind. Just then the baby iguana spotted a burrow on the opposite bank … and swam towards it. No doubt … it was practicing its hunting skills early. The mother had kept on … and didn't realize the baby had taken off. Mellors watched as the baby … peered into the burrow and then entered it. He came out shortly … without a prey … but realized his mother had gone.

Hesitant … and showing signs of anxiety … he turned to look up and down the river … then tried climbing down … but was too afraid to proceed. He climbed back into the burrow … hid himself … and peered fearfully out … for his mother. Mellors … glanced downstream but the mother was gone.

' Serves him right,' Mellors muttered under his breath … turned over on his back … and with his hand shielding his eyes … went off in a nap. A short while later … he heard the distant sound of someone calling him. He opened his bleary eyes to listen again.

' Mr. Mellors,' came the voice a short distance away to his left. He turned to see Lady Chatterly standing there with a shotgun in her hands. He jumped to his feet … and began an apology.

' A nap after lunch ma'am,' he said with a tone of being informative.

' Quite all right,' she replied, ' Mr. Mellors … may I impose on you to help me scare up some pheasants. I need to shoot at something today.'

' Certainly, ' he replied in a tone of the conformist, ' Right away.' He carried his lunch box to head back to the house.

' Where are you going Mr. Mellors,' she asked.

' To the house ma'am,' he replied,' I need to get the dogs.'

' No dogs' Mr. Mellors, she said in an air of anxiety and haste. ' You'll pick them up after I'm done.'

Mellors paused to hesitate and then replied quickly,

' Certainly Ma'am.' He placed his lunch box under a tree and they set off in the direction of the grounds where the pheasants nested. Just then … he saw the mother iguana swimming upstream looking frantically for her baby and spotting him in the burrow. The baby scrambled hurriedly out of the burrow … dived into the water and swam to his mother. She turned and headed back downstream.

After the shoot … Lady Chatterly returned to the mansion … leaving Mellors to pick up the birds in the open field. He strung them together … with a vine … and headed for the kitchen. He was reminded of another time … when he was younger … and her husband had returned from the war … physically handicapped from the waist down. It was like today … she had looked at him with eyes that were lost as to purpose. But she had stayed loyal to her husband … their entire marriage. His death recently had left her … feeling at odds about herself.

He remembered the times he would stand outside his cottage … looking at the granite walls of the house from the back … and wondering if she was going to leap into the freedom of the woods … and break the mold of the casually rich ... and the social decorum that ran their lives. But she never did … not really. Like the baby iguana … our true natures … respond to their natural birth impulses … and as humans … our nature is to include … in our choices … the nature of man. He had finally given up … but today … in viewing the gables upstairs … he wondered … if she has come to understand fully her will … for choices.

David Herbert Lawrence ( 1885-1930 ) was an author … poet and essayist … who fought the debilitating effects of the industrial revolution … and its impact on the passions of man in society. His book … Lady Chatterly's Lover … was one of the pioneering work that explored … the choices by man … to break the rules … and to bring the passions out for air. In the 100 years since the book was written … our experiment with sexual liberation … has produced the most unusual understanding about love and freedom … that may have risen above its original intent … simply as rebellion.

To advance beyond this … we find that … we have to rebel one more time … not with established society … but with ourselves. For that is where we willed our bodies … for liberty and freedom. It suited the nature of our minds to do so. Its hardly surprising therefore to find … in these times … that our continued practices of the same … seek a justification … we cannot find in our reasoning mind. The industrial revolution … has moved on … and our relationship with machines … border on the surreal. We keep a machine on our desktop these days … and can't manage without it. In that … we rediscover our humanity … and a new purpose … to which we may apply our lives to. We must be asking ourselves what we have come to learn.

Lawrence's book brought the reader to view the choices of the woman … and to gain social acceptance for those choices. It was read under covers … when it became available to the public … as it represented a peep at the female … brought out in literature. It held the women up to be viewed as the sweet pie. Its in that way easy to place the sexual responsibility on women … but after a 100 years of that … the man may want to affirm his own approval of the initiative … and take responsibility for it. It must be okay to do it now.